Anthony Weiner

Why, then, must Weiner go?

In traditional morality, what Weiner did, engage in immoral and squalid behavior, should result in permanent shame and instant removal from any position of honor.

Adherents of the old morality cannot understand why he is still in Congress. Was not Rep. Chris Lee, also of New York, a Republican, gone in four hours when it was discovered he sent a bare-chested picture of himself to Craigslist?

However, in the new morality of secular humanism, the gay rights movement and the libertarian left, what men or women do in their private lives is their own business. Sexual relations between consenting adults are neither moral nor immoral and should never be criminalized.

Under the new morality, pornography has been decriminalized and pornographic websites are among the most visited on the Internet. As for “sex-ting,” this practice is today apparently common among teenagers.

Hence the questions: By the standards of the new morality, what did Weiner do immoral? What did he do wrong, other than get caught by Andrew Breitbart?

From all we know, Weiner was engaged in private consensual dirty talk with women who apparently did not object, or they could have outed him or shut him off.

Why, then, are his friends not standing by him? Why is the party he has served faithfully as an attack dog against the GOP and a guard dog of liberalism deserting him? Why does his party want him gone? Why are they throwing him under the bus?

Answer: Weiner is expendable. One can give up a congressman whose House seat is safely Democratic. A pawn can be sacrificed if necessary. But letting a president of one’s own party be thrown out of office is another matter. A party cannot lose its king without suffering the damage the GOP did in the 1970s.

Second, House Democrats recognize that, should they declare themselves guided by the tenets of the new morality, insist that Weiner’s private life is between him and his wife, and that what he did, while embarrassing, was neither criminal nor immoral but only stupid, they would be putting at risk Democrats from districts where the traditional morality still prevails.

The national reaction to Anthony Weiner, the clamor that he get out of the House now, to which the Democratic Party is yielding, testifies to the enduring moral health of the nation.

The culture war is not yet wholly lost.